


because you could have

by capo (gliss)



Category: Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Unrequited Love, this is kind of messed up and sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-16
Updated: 2015-08-16
Packaged: 2018-04-14 23:51:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4584945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gliss/pseuds/capo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>People say Judal is a monster, but there is very little left of the human boy that was once Hakuryuu.</p>
            </blockquote>





	because you could have

**Author's Note:**

  * For [oiyukis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/oiyukis/gifts).



>   1. **warnings** include graphic imagery featuring blood and guts, not romantic sex, the gritty bits of human nature, etc
>   2. i'm sorry
> 


 

 

“Maybe there’s a universe out there — happening now — where we end up together.

Maybe there’s a universe where I’m the right person for you. Where I adore every nice thing you did for me without starting to resent you. A universe where you actually end up with someone who appreciates you. Where no one becomes a doormat. Where both of us can shed our baggage and curiosity and issues.

If you think of it all this way, then it’s like neither of us did anything wrong.

You just found me in the wrong universe. That’s all.

Because you could have loved me forever. And maybe in another universe, I let you.”

― _Gaby Dunn_

 

 

* * *

 

 

He watches Hakuryuu pick his way through the dead bodies. It’s quick work – Hakuryuu was always good with flowers and fields of similarly colored messes. In this instance everything is stained red and rust and misery, reeking of the end of the world.

Except the end of the world doesn’t come.

Hakuryuu leans over a set of bloody bones. The motion is slow and painstaking, possibly because his legs are disintegrating on the spot, vine and twine and life ebbing away back into the earth as Zagan replenishes his strength. When he lifts his head back up he’s holding a fan in his hand, the handle gilded and beautiful and gleaming, white feathers smeared with blood and guts.

Judal offers him half a grin.

There is nothing else he can offer, at the moment.

 

\---

 

Betrayal is a chain reaction and anger is contagious, so really, no one should have been surprised when their understanding turned inwards and gashed itself open like a raw wound and then proceeded to consume the status quo that had held their relationship at the functioning level.

Even so, Hakuryuu is a beautiful creature.

The more powerful a djinn, the more intricate the djinn equip – it’s a fact and a pattern stated over and over again throughout the years. He watches Belial take form every single time, and it’s always exhilarating: the way Hakuryuu’s hair gets singed white, his scars burning away, the second set of arms bursting forth from his flesh.

People say Judal is a monster, but there is very little left of the human boy that was once Hakuryuu.

He comes to rest at Hakuryuu’s side, slings a casual arm around his shoulders.

“I am the only one who gets it,” he whispers, lips twitching against Hakuryuu’s tingling skin. “Remember that.”

Hakuryuu’s jaw tightens.

“I am the only one who stays with you through the end,” Judal continues, winding himself around Hakuryuu’s body. Belial’s arms try to pry him off. They fail. His mouth is sticky with indulgence and poppy-red with danger, and when he bites the red smears itself along Hakuryuu’s face, his fine cheekbones, the soft curve of his jaw. “My beautiful king.”

The little cuts on Hakuryuu’s face seep blood gently in paper-thin red strips. Judal angles his face to fit against the spot right behind his ear, where humans are said to hear best. He whispers and it is like unspooling the long, trembling ache in his organs: “I love you, Hakuryuu.”

 

\---

 

All in all, he’d made the first move. The ball is in Hakuryuu’s court, so to speak.

Hakuryuu shows up to his room that night, his scythe in hand, six limbs whole and perfect shadowed in the pulse of the nightlights.

Judal’s smile tears across his face.

 

\---

 

It’s not – it’s not _right_ , but it _is_.

In a dream world Hakuryuu would answer his loving gazes with more loving gazes and braid his hair every morning and perhaps fuck him every night. In a dream world Hakuryuu would be more boy than magic and more magic than power-hungry and more power-hungry than flat-out furious and his hair would fan out beautifully across white pillows. In a dream world Judal would love him obviously and constantly.

Instead it’s this back-and-forth game of irritating grins and irritated frowns, every word spit between them a challenge or a demand, Judal’s mouth pulling red and strewing out word after tar-black word to coax the rukh to his command, to watch Hakuryuu pry out his insides studiously and harness them for destruction.

For every memory Judal has of a baby-faced Hakuryuu scrambling after his mother, picking dandelions, ushering Hakuei away from the stove, there is a new one of this collaged mess of a man vowing to destroy everything he cherished as a child, swearing his loyalty to nothing, cleaving the image of his first love in two. Judal rather prefers the more recent version of Hakuryuu, sharp and volatile and unpredictable as he is, to the young and barely formed one of years ago. There is a monster in them both. There is a monster in them both and it snaps its long jaws and hungers for something more raw than either of their upbringings can provide each other.

So far they’ve shared territory well, each fanged snarling head bowing enough for coexistence to happen.

And now, stupidly, Judal bares his throat.

Hakuryuu leans in, deliberately, swiftly, graceful. There’s a moment where Judal thinks maybe – maybe. There’s a soft, tender puff of air exhaled against his neck. Judal shudders and his hands are shifting up, pathetically begging and desperate and, and –

 

\---

 

“ _Fuck_.”

Hakuryuu yanks his head closer with one hand, drags his hips down hard with another two and uses the fourth to reach between their bodies, stroking roughly. He touches Judal’s chest and then his tight, aching stomach, brushes his fingernails across the tops of his thighs before settling sloppily, _perfectly_ in the middle, makes Judal scream and moan. “ _Fuck_. Do that again, do that again – harder, harder, I –”

Perhaps Judal is closer to being a god than Hakuryuu will ever be, emperor as he is, but right now Judal can only think to offer up countless prayers to this being, this magic-made creature more myth than man, his hair a shock of mystery white, eyes fierce and empty, his movements relentless and unforgiving. Judal’s panting against his shoulder, grasping around something – nothing – with shaking fingers, hymn after hymn pouring from his throat: Hakuryuu, _Hakuryuu_.

“No,” Hakuryuu states, his breathing barely strained, “what do you call me?”

“Haku–”

“ _No_.”

Judal sucks in a long breath as Hakuryuu stops moving completely. “Please –”

His head is jerked away from the warmth of Hakuryuu’s skin. One of the djinn’s hands wipe away his smudgy makeup, and it makes him feel naked, more so than he already is, overexposed and too dazed to do anything about it except gaze vaguely towards Hakuryuu’s face. He tries to find a hint of something, anything – but all there is is a hollowing determination.

The hand pulling a heavy section of his hair is merciless and cold.

“My king,” Judal breathes. And then sinks back into a haze.

 

\---

 

In the morning, Judal examines his wounds.

There’s blood pooling beneath his skin where Hakuryuu’s fingers clawed and dug and gripped, a succession of bruises outlining his throat.

Of course, Judal was the one who offered.

But Hakuryuu was the one who bit.

 

\---

 

Judal ends up saying it all the time. It is a thread that holds him together the same way Hakuryuu has the end of the thread wrapped around his wooden hand, pulling as if to unravel a knot, creating a bigger tangle in the process.

It should be a simple enough thing: Judal just has to say _I love you_ and whether or not Hakuryuu accepts it or rejects it doesn’t matter to him, in the end. And he says it; he says it frequently. He murmurs it against the inky splay of Hakuryuu’s hair as he listens to him sink into sleep, he mouths it against the sweat glistening on Hakuryuu’s neck when they fuck, he screams it as he tears a hole into the sky to render destruction and chaos onto the earth below.

He already knows that Hakuryuu doesn’t love him back. But still he’s eager, pathetically and insanely longing, and the same words tumble from his lips over and over again, chasing and seeking and scrapping at whatever it can get. It is truly something he should be ashamed of.

Hakuryuu should say _alright_ or _shut up_ or _I’ll kill you if I ever hear those words again_.

Instead, Hakuryuu does neither.

“I cannot.”

Judal gets cross about it. “What do you mean, you can’t? You either do or you don’t, you can’t _can_.”

“I cannot,” repeats Hakuryuu.

It’s something like tearing when he simply turns his head and continues on his walk. The thread becomes shredded innards and that in turn becomes blood, weeping red against Judal’s palm where his nails dig into and past callused skin. His eyes full of confusion and his teeth full of wrath, he storms away.

 

\---

 

“Oh, I get it.”

Judal lingers in midair while Hakuryuu has breakfast. It amazes him that he can still eat like that, can still _cook_ for himself – and cook deliciously, and beautifully – but every morning Hakuryuu makes his own meal, and eats it mechanically. Judal eats none of it; he prefers going out into the market and terrorizing free food from the vendors until they began to recognize him and make friends. Acquaintances.

“I get it,” and Judal claps his hands, “it’s because we’re villains, huh?”

Hakuryuu chews on his _mantou_.

“Because we gotta destroy the world, and then each other.” Judal clicks his tongue. “Damn, you’ve really put me in a bad position here.”

There is no reaction. Hakuryuu merely takes another bite – it’s tasteless, as far as Judal can tell, which doesn’t make sense but also doesn’t surprise him – and then lifts up a cup of soy milk. The whole thing looks bland. Judal _feels_ bland. He chatters on, casual, his voice dancing right through topics that clutch at men’s hearts and wrangle them into silence, but Hakuryuu hardly looks up from the table until his speech is over.

“We have work to do today, Judal.” His voice is as mechanical as the clockwork hatred ticking his life away.

_You used to be a king_ , Judal thinks, _now you’re nothing_.

He should let it go. It would be easy to toss Hakuryuu aside, let him rip himself out from the inside over this undecaying anger, and leave him to rot, helpless and lost. He cannot.

 

\---

 

Rejection is an easy term to deal with.

Rejection is habitual. Judal has lived with Hakuryuu’s rejection for most of his life.

Restraint is something else, an old disease. It picks at Hakuryuu until he is nothing but a straining mind, shattering along its quest for revenge.

 

\---

 

He watches Hakuryuu pick his way through the dead bodies and towards him.

“We kinda fucked up,” Judal says when he’s close enough to hear.

Hakuei’s fan drops into the mud. “Don’t– don’t talk. I can fix this, just let me–just let me replenish my magoi.”

Judal considers this slowly. Blood drips over the side of his mouth in time to his words. “Nah. This one’s on me, okay?”

It’s funny to watch Hakuryuu stagger to his knees like this, half-formed legs crumpling – funny in that special, gut-wrangling kind of way that has Judal wincing in sympathy, reaching out with a bloody hand. Hakuryuu curls his fingers tightly around his arm. “I can fix this,” he says again, “I can, just wait.”

“No, it’s –”

“– my fault, just let me, just give me a minute–”

“Hakuryuu.”

The world storms, overhead. The earth turns itself over inwards. Judal smiles his whetted smile. “Hell of a ride,” he offers quietly. He’s slipping. Hakuryuu looks worried, above him, one hand grasping his shoulder while the other stays useless and motionless, gutted by its own gluttony. “Not your fault.”

He shuts his eyes; night descends. The swollen sky bursts around them. A little dream crawls, moaning, by his ear – it sounds like regret.

“Judal. Judal? Open your eyes, _open your eyes_. Please. Please? Judal?”

 

\---

\---

\---

 

The sky outside is blinding, today. It’s a sunny, sea-side kind of blinding that threatens the glass-light ripples on the water and has Judal squinting periodically into the trees below.

“You’re going to get spots on your skin if you keep staying in the sun like that,” Hakuryuu calls from his perch halfway down.

Judal grins. He tosses down his basket of fruit towards a startled servant, and then reaches his arms over and back behind his head.

“Judal, don’t you dare –”

– leans back, way back, too far back –

“Judal! Stop that!”

– feels his balance scrape itself away –

“ _Judal!_ ”

– tumbles over the branch with a great laugh, darting towards the ground. Hakuryuu shrieks something as a flurry of white envelopes him, thick and lively and chattering, flutters past his cheeks like a million kisses. When it clears up Judal is sitting neatly next to him with his eyes closed expectantly and his lips smiling.

“I hate it when you do that,” Hakuryuu mumbles, resting his head on Judal’s shoulder. “Show-off magi.”

“No, you don’t.”

Judal opens  his eyes, humming contentedly. The rukh flush pink, flits from Hakuryuu’s hair to the tip of his finger. Hakuryuu’s expression is a mirror to his own.

“No, I don’t,” he concedes, and leans up to kiss Judal’s cheek.

 

 

//  **end**.

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
